Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Justin Cronin: The Passage

Justin Cronin takes the reader on a tale of survival, with the story of Amy
who may be a young girl, but she is the hope for all of mankind:

Amy is abandoned by her mother at a nunnery thinking that she may be safe
there, in the house of God with many new mothers to look after her. However, her
mother's decision does not stop the shadowy government figures that have been
hunting her from the day she was born from looking there and causing casualties.
Amy is special but no one seems to knows
why but it has something to do with government experiment, called NOAH, that is
being performed on the worst of society. When Special Agent Brad Wolgast, one
of the agents sent to hunt Amy down, meets her he knows that he cannot hand her
over to the government agency that he works for. Brad was a man who had nothing
to lose, but he will go to any lengths to keep her save especially when the
government experiment goes wrong and it is about to collapse society and the
human race as we know it. All Brad know is that Amy is special, she is the key
and keeping her safe is the only thing that may save them all.

This is a pretty epic read but a long winded one; you do need to commit a
bit of time to this book from one century to the next. This does not mean that
I did not enjoy this book but I will admit that I took a break between two of
the parts. Vampires have become too cuddly feely so I like when an author
decides to go in the complete opposite direction. While these are not called
Vampires in the book, they are called Virals, Vampires is the closest
paranormal creature to associate to them. These are not your twilight vampires
(thank God) they are the creatures of nightmares, hunting, killing and creating
more of themselves that they threaten to overthrow the human population. Though
some people equate this book to a horror novel, and while there are some parts
that are scary (I think the whole government NOAH project is one of the
scariest I have ever read) and depiction of gory scenes I don’t think it quite qualifies
as a horror novel, for me it just did not get there.

The first part of the book is about Amy and that she is special, though we don’t
really know why till part 2. You come to really feel for this little girl who
does not understand what is going on, why her mother decided to abandon and why
there are people after her. This leads her to Brad Wolgast who does not know
why the company he worked for wants this little girl, but he knows that he
cannot hand her over to them and he risks everything to save her. The love that
her and Brad (very much a father daughter relationship) is amazing as Brad
realizes just how important she is. Amy is a young girl so in the first part of
the book she is depicted well as the child she is and you feel for her and the
loses that she experiences as well as the fear she goes through.

It was interesting to see the connection between the first and second parts as
you wonder what happens to Amy as what happens to her at the end of the first
part is not clearly detailed (but I believe that Cronin does this on purpose).
It has been about a 100 years since the first part and the world has gone to
hell. The world has become one where you need high walls and as many
ultraviolet lights in order to protect the cities (or more like Colonies) that
are left. Cronin does an amazing job depicting this apocalyptic world of the
future and the desperate state that the people are in. We also get introduced
to a whole bunch of new characters that are a rag tag of survivors who are
desperately looking where they believe is a human stronghold and hopefully
answer as to how the world became this way. I don’t want to give too much of
the second part of the book away but Amy is still alive 100 years later and
does meet up with this group of colonists.

I think after reading this book you may feel like a break but know that you
need to pick up the next book in this series. I am very interested to see where
Cronin takes us in the next book in this series and I know I will be picking it
up soon, I mean with the ending that this book had, you would be crazy not to
pick up the next book.

1 comment:

Great Review and I totally agree about the epic-ness and about the connections between the two parts of the book. I'm interested in how you liked the second in the trilogy, The Twelve. The final book in the trilogy comes out in December, The City of Mirrors. I can't wait!

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Hello,

My name is J-9 and I am proud to be a Bookworm.

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